You're Not Growing Fast Because You're Making Decisions Slowly | Ep 859

Think and Grow Rich is a guide to success by Napoleon Hill, which was first published in 1937 following the Great Depression. It was immediately welcomed as an antidote to hard times and remained a bestseller for decades. Many people still find its philosophy of positive thinking and its specific steps for achieving wealth both relevant and life-changing. Hill contends that our thoughts become our reality, and offers a plan and principles for transforming thoughts into riches, including visualization, affirmation, creating a Master Mind group, defining a goal, and planning.

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Effectiveness is key to individual and organizational success. Without it, other attributes, such as talent, intelligence, knowledge, and hard work, are useless.

Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.

In 1994, a young programmer named Jeff Bezos took a chance, quit his job, and founded the first online bookstore. Three decades later, his business—Amazon—is valued at over $1 trillion and has revolutionized the online marketplace. Invent and Wander is a compilation of Bezos’s letters to Amazon shareholders, combined with excerpts from interviews and speeches. Its narrative chronicles Amazon’s rise from a niche retailer to a digital superstore while also illustrating Bezos’s values and insights into innovation and success.

In this guide, we’ll explore the history of Amazon as it grew to a thriving online marketplace that also became an invaluable resource for cloud-based computing. We’ll delve into the principles that Bezos says are central to Amazon’s success and compare Bezos’s management decisions with those of his contemporaries. Since Bezos presents an insider’s view of Amazon, we’ll also hear from outside voices who are critical of Bezos’s leadership style and Amazon’s impact on the market.

Amazon is now the largest Internet retailer in the world, and it increasingly penetrates our everyday life, from being the first stop for our online shopping to interfacing with our physical world through Echo and Alexa.

But over 20 years ago, Amazon was just an online bookstore in the rising tide of the web. In its darkest times, detractors repeatedly predicted it would go bankrupt, that titans like Walmart would easily crush it, and that it would be out-executed by tech darlings like eBay and Google.

As we now know, the dogged determination of Jeff Bezos and Amazon overcame all these objections. In The Everything Store, learn the history of Amazon from its early days to 2014, along with the company values that led its their immense success.

What are the secrets to being successful in your career? How do you build a world-changing product-based business? Entrepreneur Tony Fadell answers these questions and more in Build. The book is part career encyclopedia and part memoir, detailing Fadell’s extraordinary journey inventing the iPhone, and then starting Nest (a smart home device company) and selling it to Google for billions of dollars.

In this guide, we’ll first describe Fadell’s career trajectory—including how he failed to build a smartphone several times before finally hitting it big with the iPhone. Then, we’ll share Fadell’s advice for succeeding in every stage of your career, whether you’re just starting out or a CEO. We’ll also share his tips for creating a successful product-based business and building a great team. Along the way, we'll discuss how Fadell’s advice compares with other experts’ tips on building successful products, businesses, and teams.